Learn healthier habits. One way to grow your willpower is to turn wished-for behaviours into habits. This means building routines until certain cues of time or place prompt you to go for a run, say, or eat the right kind of food, without even thinking about it. How long does it take to form a new habit? Phillippa Lally at UCL’s Health Behaviour Unit asked 96 participants to keep a daily diary and the average time it took for a new healthy habit to reach peak automaticity was 66 days – far longer than previous estimates. The good news was that a single missed day had little long-term impact on successful habit formation, although repeated omissions did have a cumulative detrimental effect on the maximum automaticity that was reached.

Use your inner voice. We’re all familiar with the little voice in our head that tells us not to be naughty. A 2010 suggested this voice really does play a useful role in self-control. When participants were instructed to repeat the word "computer" in their heads - thereby occupying their inner voice - they fared less well at a lab test of self control. "[T]his study provides evidence that when we tell ourselves to 'keep going' on the treadmill, or when we count to ten during an argument, we may be helping ourselves to successfully overcome our impulses in favour of goals like keeping fit, and preserving a relationship," the researchers said.

Train your willpower. They say willpower is like a muscle. Although acts of self-restraint can leave us temporarily vulnerable to temptation, just as if our sinews of willpower were fatigued, longer-term the more we practise using self-restraint, the stronger our willpower muscle becomes. Researchers showed this in 2010. Students who practised avoiding snack food for two weeks ended up being better at lab tests of self-control, as compared with control participants who merely completed maths problems.

Climb aboard the mind-bus. Imagine you are the driver of a "mind-bus" and any difficult thoughts about temptation are the awkward passengers. Choose a specific method for dealing with these difficult thoughts/passengers and rehearse it mentally for five minutes - for example, either describe the passengers, let them know who is in charge, make them talk with a different accent, or sing what they are saying. The idea is to teach you that you are not your thoughts and you have control over them. A study published earlier this year found the mindbus technique was an effective way to resist eating chocolates.

Clench your muscles. Flexing your muscles can augment your willpower by evoking non-conscious goal-related thoughts and emotions. Across five studies published in 2010, Iris Hung and Aparna Labroo showed that various forms of muscle flexion, from fist clenching to calf muscle tightening, helped participants to endure pain now for later benefit, and to resist short- term gain (e.g. snack food) in order to fulfil a long-term gain of better health. Research published this year also showed that fist-squeezing can help prevent choking in high-pressure sports situations, although in this case the underlying mechanism (right hemisphere activation) was thought to be different.